I've decided to make this a short-office day. I teach but one class, and my office hours are over before that class. I do have to grab some soil (between downpours) for tomorrow afternoon's lab, but other than that, the only requirements on my time (well, other than 5 pm piano lesson) are self-imposed.

I can read journal articles just as well at home. Better, in fact, as I don't have a computer that's linked up to the Internet right in front of me tempting me to take breaks and surf.

****

I finished reading "Jacquard's Web" Sunday night. The second half of the book was not, I think, as interesting as the first. I don't know if that's because I already knew some of the history of "modern" computing (making it less novel to me) or if the author was less expert/less interested in that section.

That said, it's interesting, some of the 'vestigial organs' or 'suboptimal solutions' we see in modern computing that are remnants of the old card-feeding days. The author mentioned the 80 column limit of a DOS prompt box - that was the size limit of a card. And I know another one. On the "old" (non-menu-driven) versions of SAS (a stats program), you would write a program to do what data analysis and then the last line had to be "CARDS;" - a throwback to the punched-card days (Or so we were told. There were a lot of capricious things about the version of SAS I learned on. Heh. I remember there was some divide between proponents of SPSS and SAS in my graduate department. The (rather Severus Snape-like, now that I think of it) Stats prof was known to comment that "SPSS was written BY idiots, FOR idiots" but I knew at least one other person whose response to that (not to the prof's face) was that "SAS was written BY a**holes, FOR a**holes.")

I never actually used punched cards - they went out before my time - but I have worked with a mainframe stats package (the mainframe version of SPSS). Where you write the program for your analysis run, send it in, walk over to the computer center, pick up the big big stack of pale green and white striped paper, start reading through the output, find the place where you made a mistake in your program and it terminated early, and then cry or swear (depending on frame of mind), go back to the office, fix the error, re-run the program, go pick up the next big stack of paper, find the next error, lather, rinse, repeat.

It strikes me that the main characteristic for success in graduate school is not so much intelligence as it is a bulldog-like tenaciousness.

The author of Jacquard's Web did also talk about some of the early programming. I did not learn much programming (even though you could allegedly get "foreign language credit" for a programming language; by the time I went through, the requirement was down to one language and my French was more than sufficient to fulfill that.

So the only programming I remember is a tiny bit of BASIC that I learned in school and from noodling around on my family's TI-44A (I think that was the model). All I remember now is writing GOTO loops to print something rude on the screen multiple times. (Given the kind of kid I was, the "rudest" word I think I ever used was "fart." And I remember being doubled over with laughter at just how "bad" I was for making a program that repeated "fart" on the screen 50 times.)

****

I also finished the first Gervase Fen mystery. This is yet another Golden Age mystery series. Fen is an Oxford don.

I'm sorry to report, but I don't think I like Fen very much. He seems awfully vague, and yet at the same time bent on proving himself smarter than everyone else. And I think the author of the series "cheats" a bit given the "rules" of Golden Age Mysteries - he DOESN'T supply us with the information that Fen has; stuff is held back.

Oh, I'll try reading a later one - this was, after all, the first ("The Case of the Gilded Fly") and I would not have liked Albert Campion much if the first thing I read of him was "The Crime at Black Dudley."

But Fen seems to lack a lot of the appeal of most series detectives. And darn it, if I'm going to read a series of books featuring a certain character, there has to be some appeal to them.

Fen does not have the suavity and gentlemanliness of Inspector Alleyn. Nor does he have the amusing, upper-middle-class twit charm of Campion. He doesn't have the fussy propriety of Poirot. He doesn't even have the broody intelligence of Nero Wolfe.

(And upon re-reading some of the Wolfe stories, I've come to the conclusion that Archie would irritate me a bit after a while - I mean, if they were real people I interacted with in real life - but that I'd rather like Wolfe. And I like to fancy [does anyone else do things like this] that though Archie probably wouldn't have the slightest interest in me (my age, for one thing*, and the fact that I don't dance, and I think I'm probably not his "type" anyway), Wolfe just might, seeing as I am intelligent, not given to emotional outbursts even in difficult situations, AND I know the difference between "imply" and "infer." And that I'm not one of those tiresome women who "can't" eat certain things or "can't" enjoy them out of worry about her figure.)

(*It's odd and a little sad to realize that I am now "too old for" Archie Goodwin. I've been reading the novels since I was 18 or so.)

Yes, that's the extent of my crushes these days. Characters in novels that are so old that, were they real people, they'd be long-dead. (If I were a more histrionic sort, I'd insert a "**sob**" right there).

***

So, having finished a couple things I was working on (I'm still reading "The Tempest," I'm about halfway through it), I started reading "The Victorian Internet" last night.

It promises to be really interesting. (It's currently out of print for some reason. It is a ten-year-old book so maybe they're doing an update, I don't know. I found a used copy from Powell's.)

The central idea is that the "Information superhighway" (Do we still call it that?) is nothing really new; the telegraph in the Victorian era was a precursor. I don't have the exact quotation (the book is at home and I am at work), but the author notes in the introduction that the telegraph changed the way news was reported, caused people to fall in love long-distance, and also led to new types of crime.

So far I've read the first 30 pages or so, where the Standridge (the author) talks about the earliest form of telegraphy: an optical telegraph that was kind of like a semaphore system. It was a series of poles with movable arms, and the positions of the arms indicated what letter - they were controlled by pulleys.

I never knew this existed. Never. It amazes me how there is a lot of stuff in history that was never even mentioned when I learned it in school. And I had pretty good history classes. And I've read a lot of history. Apparently these telegraphs were used during the Napoleonic wars and such. And I never knew about them.

(None of the towers still exist; Standridge observes that the only memory of them is in several places being named "Telegraph Hill" after the location of the towers).

Oh, and another reason why I like buying used books: there was an inscription in this one. On one side of the flyleaf it said, "Nothing is really new!" and on the other "Happy Birthday, '99 style! Love, Mark and Carla."

****

Incidentally, I noticed while reading last night (I take my glasses off when I read in bed - in fact, I often take them off whenever I'm reading for an extended period of time - I didn't have the "short arms" issue - I could hold the book as close as I ever did and still read fine. So I wonder if it could be that my glasses prescription has changed, maybe in regards the astigmatism? My eye doctor once commented that my left eye had "gotten better," so apparently it is possible for one's eyes to become less bad. Maybe that's what's happening, I don't know.

I suppose my current glasses (which I have not changed in a number of years as my prescription has changed only minimally) might now be a bit strong as regards astigmatism, and that could be the problem.

Or I could pull my other leg.